To be fair, that's more the Third Republic's verdict than what recent historians have concluded. For sure, Sedan was a catastrophe and the Mexican adventure was worse, but the two decades in between gave France the railway build-out, Haussmann's Paris, the creation of modern investment banks, and even universal male suffrage, which the Republic then kept ([1], [2] & [3]).

In this particular instance, everybody in this thread seems to be forgetting the region where the fires are currently raging used to be very unsanitary swamps before the pine forests were planted. These older wetlands were a major source of disease and misery for the local population. The reason why they only planted pines were because the soil there is poor & acidic. Nothing else grows really. Now of course, this needs to be rethought in the light of climate change, but it wasn't a stupid idea at the time.

[1] The unlikely triumph of Napoleon III, https://engelsbergideas.com/reviews/the-unlikely-triumph-of-...

[2] Napoleon III and the Second Empire, https://www.routledge.com/Napoleon-III-and-the-Second-Empire...

[3] The People's Emperor, https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571361304-the-peoples-em...